Inpursuitof

With my own nuptials trundling slowly into my grasp, Mexico City’s latest idea of ‘fixed-term’ marriages is a quandrous idea. The concept is simple: set a time limit at the beginning, decide what you do if it all goes south and then opt in or out when the bell rings. It’s not so much death as paperwork that does the parting. 

With soaring divorce rates, is this the answer or is it just shuffling the numbers around? You could be cynical, you could say it’s preparing for the end before the beginning. You could say this is the step past a pre-nup, deciding not just who gets the kids but when. You could say that no-one should go into a marriage thinking that it isn’t going to be forever. 

I have to think that perhaps it’s a more proactive route, that the upside is you both actively choose to stay together, every 2 years or 5 or 15. Is staying together forever really the best use of our lives, if staying together means being miserable? Divorce rates in the over-50s are rising as people look at the person they’ve spent 25 years with and decide that they’ve grown apart, not together. Does that make them bad people? Or are they freeing two people from a life of sniping at each other about the cereal? And what about the ones staying together? They’re looking at the person on the other pillow and saying ‘yeah. We’re still good together. Even with the cereal.’

So who knows if this proposal will make the Big Proposals any different. I guess it comes down to whether you think marriage is forever or for as long as you make each other happy. I hope ours will last forever, but if I ever stop making my wife happy, and we can’t make it better, I hope more that she has the strength to leave.

1) 3 grapes in a plastic cup

2) Her

3) The Lidl guy who saw me put on my many shades of blue.